Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust Read Online Free PDF Page B

lucky – we lost our entire families and we can never bring them back. We had to make terrible choices. And when we speak to you, we remember all these choices, and the tears are as fresh now as they were then.’ Maybe that’s the sadness I felt leaving these interviews, the sense that the past is not over; that these political resistors carry inside them a set of moral perspectives for the present, for us who were not there. And in recounting these numerous acts of courage and tough choices, they ask the audience to listen and not to judge. They want us to know something of what it meant to be there in those barren fields, prison camps and dense forests. What these men and women accomplished is political in the most profound sense of the word: the undergrounds and partisans preserved the political space of identity and freedom, creating communities of friendship in primitive forests and enduring the most unimaginable hardships. The public life of these fighters and resistance groups and underground organizations is not the public space of institutions, but these fighters and survivors created public spaces carved out of desperate times, and whose very existence contributed to the survival of thousands who would otherwise have died.
    No moral ambivalence framed the narrative of Miles Lerman; the German assault rendered traditional moralities obsolete and danger ous to survival.
    ‘The peasants eventually took us seriously; we had no hesitation
    – we would kill whom we had to. If we had to burn a peasant village to protect ourselves or punish an informer, we would do it. The Germans looked at us like we were mice or rats; they would trade sugar or vodka for Jews. Some peasants gave up Jews for a bottle of vodka. This happened in our area; a peasant had trapped a couple of Jews by offering them some food, and then turned them over to the Germans. One night we showed up at the house of the peasant and hanged him and put a sign on him that said, “this will happen to peasants who betray Jews”. If we had to, we would kill an entire family; there was no other way to protect ourselves. If the peasants would hand in Jews for a glass of vodka, now, how do you handle that?’
    The ghetto: demoralization and breakdown
    Critics of Jewish inaction, like Hannah Arendt and Raul Hilberg, capture an important reason for the absence of a more violent mass resistance: 2 the role of the Judenrate in collaborating with the Germans. Yet, even that story should be treated very carefully, since members of the many Judenrate in both the large and small ghettos believed that cooperation would assure the survival at least of a remnant of the Jewish community. A physician whom I interviewed in Warsaw, who had been in the Lodz ghetto, told me that after the war he would have been first in line to kill Chaim Rumkowski, the notorious head of the Lodz Judenrat who continually bartered away Jews for selection. ‘But now I regard him as a great man.’ I was sur prised by this since Rumkowski facilitated the infamous exchange of children under the age of ten and the elderly over 65 for several thousand Jews who were capable of work. ‘You ask me why I think he is now a great man? Because he kept Jews alive in the ghetto longer than any other ghetto leader.’ In the spring of 1944 some 60,000 Jews remained in Lodz, until they were all transported and murdered in Auschwitz later that summer and fall.
    While in retrospect that strategy was fatal, Rumkowski appears at least to this survivor to have engineered strategies that prolonged survival – of at least a remnant. The point Dr. M. was making was that moral culpability is difficult to assign, and we should be very careful how we evaluate terrible decisions imposed on the Jewish community, although in Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt expressed moral outrage at Judenrat collaborators.
    At what point should the Judenrate have realized the enormity of German intent? The ordinary, compliant men chosen by